A new survey suggests the employer-employee bond has broken down, with real consequences for performance and engagement
Emotional ambiguity. Unclear labels. No future plans. But neither party is quite ready to walk away.
These are the hallmarks of a so called "situationship" in dating. According to a new survey from career site Zety, they're also the hallmarks of the American workplace right now.
The survey, published earlier this month, found that 63% of employees don't think their company is committed to keeping them around, and 59% don't see a clear long-term path where they work. Yet just 27% say they're actively planning to leave, meaning nearly three quarters are staying put.
The pattern echoes something academics have studied for years under less romantic terms, the psychological contract that shapes what employees expect from their employer, and the ties that keep people in a job after that contract frays.
A psychological contract that's stopped delivering
Denise Rousseau, professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh, has studied the psychological contract, the unspoken expectations between employer and employee, for decades.
"Organizations aren't making commitments, and when they do make them, they're not very credible," Rousseau said. "A lot of what makes a psychological contract valuable is the future creating possibilities of what we're preparing you for, what you can see yourself doing in this organization."
She traces the shift to the 1990s, when companies moved away from developing talent internally toward buying skills on the market, and fewer companies today invest in training, development, or a visible path to promotion. Rousseau said that absence matters more than people realize.
"What's diminished has not just been job security, it has been a promise of the future," she said.
That erosion showed up directly in the survey data. Limited growth opportunities was the top reason respondents gave for feeling this way, cited by 32%, ahead of feeling unfulfilled or frustrated (23%) and poor manager relationships (19%). Rousseau said that matches what she hears from students and executives, who often describe staying for the paycheck while pursuing development elsewhere.
HRD America has reported on this same frustration before, including workers feeling stalled by the illusion of career growth despite appearing to advance on paper.
Why people stay anyway
If the relationship feels this shaky, why aren't more employees walking away? Rousseau points to one possible reason. Even when people look around, they're often not finding better options, since employers broadly have pulled back on training and development.
"The grass is not greener and people know it," she said.
Brooks Holtom, professor of management at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business in Washington, D.C., co-developed job embeddedness, a concept that explains why people stay in roles even when unhappy. He said the current job market is a big part of the story.
"In a context where you have high unemployment, there's low mobility and people sort of stay around to get that paycheck or enjoy that financial stability," Holtom said. "But if the job market picks up, then those employees who are less embedded are much more likely to consider leaving."
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on quits backs that up. The quits rate, a measure of how willing workers are to walk away from a job, sat at 1.9% in May 2026, a long-term low.
That dynamic is exactly what his research on job embeddedness tracks. Holtom said that when someone stays mainly for stability rather than out of genuine commitment or fit, it tends to show up in weaker performance and less of what researchers call organizational citizenship behavior, the everyday willingness to go beyond the job description.
Holtom pointed to two forces behind that broader disconnect. More employees are working remotely than before the pandemic, at organizations that still haven't figured out how to keep distributed workers engaged, and mounting uncertainty about what artificial intelligence means for jobs is adding to the strain.
"I think people who feel uncertainty from their employer reciprocate with sort of uncertainty about how much they want to stay or how deeply committed they are," he said.
The cost shows up in daily behavior too.
"Our research shows that there's higher absenteeism among these types of employees," he said, along with fewer of the above and beyond contributions that make a workplace feel like more than a paycheck.
That tracks with what HRD America has reported among employees who feel stuck in their careers and with Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, which found global engagement fell to its lowest level since 2020 last year, even as the U.S. labor market outperformed most of the world.
What HR leaders can actually do
If the problem is a psychological contract that's stopped signaling commitment, the solution has to start with what employers actually promise employees about their future at the company. Rousseau said organizations need to be careful here.
"Make no promises that you can't keep," Rousseau said. Vague reassurances about opportunity or culture won't hold up against day to day experience, and leaders should be honest about what they can actually commit to.
"Cheap talk only gets us so far."
Holtom points to something more specific: visible, structured paths for advancement.
"Developing clear career paths with the appropriate training, mentoring, and shadowing that will help them to move along that path would make a large contribution towards better performance and retention," he said.
Longer tenured employees are often harder to win back than new hires, since they've watched promises come and go before.
"Longer tenured employees will certainly demand more proof that this isn't just happy talk," Holtom said.
That's the harder work ahead for most employers. It's easier to make a new hire feel wanted than to convince someone who has watched five years of unmet promises go by. But the alternative is the pattern both researchers point toward, a workforce that shows up, collects a paycheck, and keeps its options open without saying so.
Career growth pathways support retention across nearly every industry, and building them doesn't require a large budget. It requires specificity, credibility, and a willingness to treat the relationship as a genuine two way exchange, rather than an unfulfilling "situationship."
